Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity by Hyung Il Pai

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity by Hyung Il Pai Roald Maliangkay Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity by Hyung Il Pai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. 298 pp. 41 photographs. 3 maps. 6 tables. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $30.00 (paper). $75.00 (hardcover) Governments have long dedicated vast resources to the collection and display of both tangible and intangible markers of identity. Apart from generating feelings of nostalgia or pride over the display of unique feats and objects, collections allow the establishment and denial of hierarchies, whether along racial, cultural, or national lines. The notion that a museum has a scientific pedigree lends credibility to the representation, even though it may be no more than an imaginary, idealized arrangement that reveals more about the object of an exhibit than its subject. Heritage displays, in particular, have a wide range of possible applications, including the purely commercial, but they come at a cost. The negative impact caused by heritage tourism, for example, can be an unavoidable compromise, but restitution efforts can rarely keep up with the loss and damage it may cause. That is not to say that the interests of the preservationists are always altruistic. As Howard has argued in his work on the preservation of Korea’s intangible cultural heritage, Korean music traditions have been and continue to be adjusted to suit the interests of officials, academics, and artists.1 In Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity, Hyung Il Pai demonstrates that in Japan and Korea the management of the tangible cultural heritage has also been the culmination of compound interests. Focusing on the work of academics, collectors, businessmen, and policymakers, Pai shows how they all had a hand in shaping the way in which heritage is preserved in both countries today. Following a chapter that recounts the history of South Korean efforts to manage cultural heritage and discusses its main challenges, Pai takes the reader back to Japan’s reaction to the pivotal world fairs in the mid-nineteenth century. It was in the 1860s that, on the advice of Japanese and foreign diplomats and academics, the Japanese Education Ministry began to carefully prepare missions to international exhibitions to promote Japanese artifacts to the world. The great success of the Japanese Pavilion at the Vienna 1873 International Exhibition represented an important first step toward establishing broad recognition of the value of Japan’s national heritage. By focusing on both natural and man-made [End Page 462] curios, the exhibit managed to capitalize on a fast growing interest in Oriental items (p. 37) in the West and start “the first wave of ‘Japonisme’” (p. 40). Pai then moves to the issue of classifying ancient objects, to which the Vienna Exhibition had provided a major impetus, a discussion that leads her to introduce the earlier work on Japanese ethnology and archeology by collectors such as Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866) and Arai Hakusei (1657–1725), respectively. Pai also describes the role played by foreign collectors and connoisseurs of Japanese art, including James Lord Bowes (1834–99), Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926), Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1903), and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) who helped raise awareness of the value of historical artifacts in Japan and the need to establish a national heritage management system. Fenollosa would serve the Meiji government for twelve years, during which he became known as one of the foremost connoisseurs of Japanese art and as a mentor for collectors of Japanese curios both at home and abroad. A subscriber to the notion of diffusionism, Fenollosa argued that the roots of Japanese art were to be traced on the continent, via central Asia to the ancient empires of southern Europe. Despite his bias and his open criticism of the absence of “high art” in Japan (p. 82), he pledged to help develop the export of Japanese crafts and remained committed to raising Japanese awareness of the value of Japanese art while warning of the immediate urgency of measures to prevent its loss (p. 78). As Pai relates the involvement of Fenollosa and his contemporaries in the...